Day 2 - Holy Smoke

So - for anyone that cares to remember, I said I would take proper time to evaluate this thing and report back in a couple of weeks. I feel I need to come on here quickly and correct something I said yesterday however.

I loaded FCPX onto my two year old Core2Duo laptop with 4Gb RAM. I already had FCP7 on there (yup, knew it wasn't ideal, but this isn't a work machine so....) I didn't realise I needed to install the codecs download (not sure yet what difference that will make when I try it). It seemed slow. I said so.

So today I got a new quad-core i7 iMac. 16gb RAM. 2Gb gfx card. Nice machine - I ordered two of them before X was released as After Effects stations for an upcoming job. They're fast - nice machines, 8 virtual cores.

I've spent the evening playing with ProRes and h.264 footage (home movies from a 550D in the latter case) and HOLY SMOKE. This software is fast. I just dropped 10 effects (yup - all a bit cheesy like FCP7's, although a bit more modern) onto a 1080i50 ProRes clip and it played back at a very useable frame rate. Any couple of effects made NO DIFFERENCE to playback, it was realtime.

I still have no idea how to use it - and I'm just tinkering (although it seems easy enough to me to do proper editing - what was all the fuss about?), but goddamn if I'm not enjoying it.

One revelation - I love the filmstrip view. It's so fast to find shots.

Another - I've been swapping around machines for the last two days. FCPX does not care. I pick up where I left off. Metadata WIN.

Another - the context sensitive timeline tools make sense to me almost straight away. Edits happen fast. The precision editor works well.

I KNOW - it's not all there yet. Fine - but most of it will be eventually. Soon enough for you and me? Who knows. I can wait 6 months making money with FCP7 - which is still up there with other current systems.

This thing - with a full set of features? Holy smoke. I've has a little whiff of this thing now, and it smells like the future.

Come on Apple - one last roll of the dice. If you let me down, I'll move on. But this thing deserves a chance. Really.

I just put together a rough cut of a :60 commercial in record time. All the audio automatically synced. The filmstrip allowed me to very quickly pull great reaction shots. I even auditioned a few, just for kicks.

Certainly ran into a few bugs (what's with it always defaulting to 720p??) and still getting used to a lot of things... but it sure is fast.

[Ben Holmes]"I KNOW - it's not all there yet. Fine - but most of it will be eventually."

I don't know why this is said with such certainty by most defenders here. Maybe a couple of things in the ecosystem will come...but honestly, they have had 4 years to roll this out. What was left on the floor was not by accident unless the model here is to charge for things that should have come standard in every other NLE...where is Apple on this? Beta testers are not confirmations...

It needs to be said with every review that puts the unknown future in it as certainty, these things are not promised to come...they were dropped and weren't just left out arbitrarily...they weren't "rushed" to put this out.

"it was realtime."

This is pretty standard in today's workflows but are you even looking at them natively or does X work on proxy??

There's no certainty in any of this - did you read the end of my post?

And I'm not a 'defender' - I'm giving an honest reaction to the act of editing with it. I said I'll give it 6 months, and I will. Most people here are not giving it 6 hours. Who's more crazy - them or me?

[Jamie Franklin]"I just think it's fair to say: these features might not be returning...they were dropped. Lets call it what it is, not what it could be on speculation from beta testers...
"

What's fair about that? You know absolutely nothing about Apple's future plans. Some of the beta testers have spoken to Apple, how have said more is coming. Of course more is coming. Will it be everything you want? Who knows. But there's absolutely nothing 'fair' about saying they were dropped. Isn't it possible Apple just haven't got it all working yet?

Now - if you're asking if this was good PR by Apple - Hell no. I think they thought what they had was worth releasing, and damn the reaction. Time will tell how that plays out for them - and for the record, I don't like it either. But please: 'fair'. That's exactly what you're NOT being.

[Jamie Franklin]"I just think it's fair to say: these features might not be returning...they were dropped."

It's not as if Apple had these features and ripped these features out and deliberately discarded them. That would make it unlikely they'd ever return. But FCP X is a new app, which has never had implementations of these features. For them to exist there, Apple has to implement them from scratch there. Which takes time.

good points all. There is no way Apple did not know how professional editors would react. it seems they just did not care, in a business sense. They can sell a few thousand units at $1000 or a million at $300, so i understand. This doesn't make me any less sad.

Well, to put it in perspective, it's not quite as bad as how they handled Shake. They let that sit for about 3 or 4 years without addressing any of the well known rumors that Apple was overhauling it into a next-gen node compositor codenamed Phenomenon. Then they just EOLed it.